Chapter 323: The Odds of a First-Try Hit?
Clutching the printed checkup report from the medical pod, Finesse made her way back to the villa still in a complete daze.
"How could this be?"
The second day, finding that the nausea hadn't let up at all, if anything had gotten worse, Finesse had finally taken Amano Rei's advice from the day before and gone to the medical pod built into the villa complex.
Growing up, she'd rarely ever gotten sick, let alone caught something as minor as a cold. Finesse had always had complete confidence in her own body's constitution.
And yet the results came back showing every single indicator perfectly normal. No illness. No cold. Not even a stomach upset from eating expired food out of the fridge.
With every other reading completely normal, only one line stood out, glaringly out of place: pregnant.
The instant Finesse got her hands on the report, she couldn't even process what it actually meant.
Carrying the report all the way back from the community medical pod to the villa's living room, still in a daze, Finesse muttered softly to herself.
"Does this mean it hit on the first try? Was that good luck for Amano, or bad luck?"
The sheer overwhelming shock of it left Finesse's current state of mind impossible to sort into anything as simple as happy or sad. It was something far more tangled than that.
"I'm going to be a mom too?"
Mom Finesse. About to become a literal mom now.
Right then, the villa's front door burst open, and Kikawayu strolled into the living room, schoolbag slung over one shoulder, humming a little tune.
Finesse hadn't expected anyone to come home at this hour, and hurriedly tucked the report behind her back in a panic.
"Ki, Kikawayu? Why aren't you at Synchro Academy for evening study tonight?"
"Rei's not going to evening study tonight either, so I figured why bother, and skipped out to come home instead."
Seeing Kikawayu, Finesse actually found herself quietly relieved.
Kikawayu, as Amano Rei's best friend since childhood, was probably the one person in this whole villa most likely to understand Amano Rei, and best positioned to guess how he'd actually react once he found out.
"What are you hiding there?" Kikawayu leaned in, curious. "Something dirty?"
"Kikawayu, can I ask your advice on something?"
Paper couldn't hold back fire forever. It was only a matter of time before this got out anyway.
Still, before actually coming clean about it, Finesse figured she should do a little emotional groundwork first.
If Amano found out about this, would he be happy? Or would it just stress him out?
Deciding to feel things out ahead of time, Finesse figured she'd start by gathering a little intel from Amano Rei's own best friend.
Finesse held out the report she'd been hiding behind her back.
"A checkup report?" Taking the paper, Kikawayu tilted her head, confused at first. "What's this about, Lady Finesse, are you sick? It's not something serious, is it?"
"Just look at the last line."
"The last line?"
Skimming quickly over the report, Kikawayu's eyes drifted downward, and that was when she spotted the word printed there: pregnant.
"Eh?" Kikawayu's eyes blinked, her reaction identical to Finesse's own the moment she'd first gotten the report, a complete failure to process what she was even looking at.
"Does this 'pregnant' mean, Lady Finesse, you're having a baby?"
"Well, that's probably about the size of it."
"Whose is it?" Kikawayu asked, going straight for the heart of the matter without a shred of hesitation.
The sheer bluntness of the question, no beating around the bush whatsoever, actually left Finesse a little flustered.
After all, she and Amano Rei's relationship still wasn't public knowledge. But since she was already asking Kikawayu for advice, there was no point hiding it now.
"A, Amano..." Finesse fidgeted, finally giving her answer.
For just an instant, the light in Kikawayu's eyes went completely dark, her voice dropping to an unmistakable, icy chill.
"Finesse, are you saying, this is Rei's child?"
"Yeah, more or less, that's about the size of it. So Kikawayu, help me think this through. Based on what you know about Amano, if I tell him this, how do you think he'll react?"
"You're asking me how Rei will react?"
Kikawayu's thumb, still gripping the report, had already unconsciously torn straight through the paper, her nails digging deep into her own palm underneath.
Even so, she forced herself to hold back the darkness surging up inside her.
"I think it'd be better not to tell Rei just yet."
"Huh, why not?"
"Rei's leaving for outside the Tower with Kaiba Corp next week. It's bound to be dangerous out there. This really isn't the time to be piling extra worries on him. At the very least, wait until he's back from the expedition to tell him."
"That's actually really well thought out, Kikawayu! You're right, for Amano's safety, it's probably best to keep this from him for now."
Convinced by Kikawayu's calm, reasoned analysis, Finesse sighed with relief. "Good thing I talked this over with you. No wonder you're the best friend who grew up sharing underwear with Amano, you really think things through."
"It's not that impressive. I just... know Rei a little better than most, that's all."
"Then help me think through one more thing. If Amano finds out about this, will he actually be happy, or will it just stress him out?"
"Knowing Rei's personality..."
Where Finesse couldn't see it, Kikawayu had very nearly bitten the inside of her own cheek to the point of bleeding.
"Sorry, I honestly can't guess on this one. Let's just wait and see when the time comes. I'm a little tired today, I'm going to head to my room."
"Don't go, stay and chat with me a little longer."
Finesse's attempt to hold her back did nothing to stop Kikawayu's footsteps, earning her nothing but the heavy sound of a door slamming shut.
Yubel: "I'm honestly impressed you held that together. I already had myself braced to step in and stop you at any moment."
Kikawayu: "I can't, Yubel. This isn't okay. It's already not okay anymore. There's no more time left. If I keep waiting, Rei is going to disappear from my side."
The thread of her own rational mind had held on, apparently, right up until the exact moment that door closed.
By now, Kikawayu was already showing the first clear signs of unraveling into something close to incoherence.
Yubel: "Calm down, Kikawayu."
Kikawayu: "How am I supposed to calm down! I listened to you and waited until I turned twenty, and this is what happens! No. This is absolutely not okay. I can't wait any longer!"
Yubel: "Kikawayu, please, don't do anything reckless. That could end up hurting both you and Amano Rei at once."
Kikawayu: "It won't. I already have a plan. The opportunity's right in front of me now. Tomorrow, I'm making my move!"
Yubel: "Making your move? Kikawayu, don't tell me you're planning to!"
Meanwhile, over at the Kaiba family residence.
"Yo, Chiha. Nice computer screen?"
"You creep!" Kaiba Chiha ground her pearly white teeth. "Amano Rei, who said you could come into my room?"
"Hey now, don't go accusing me of things I didn't do. I never actually went in." Amano Rei lifted a foot, showing he was still planted firmly outside the doorway. "Besides, I wouldn't want to step into your trash heap of a room anyway. It's only Yui who doesn't mind it."
Discarded clothes, socks, half-eaten snack bags, and delivery boxes littered the entire floor.
As for Kaiba Chiha herself, up top she wore nothing but an oversized ita-shirt, its collar slouched so far off to one side that her whole left shoulder was completely bare, printed across the front with some female character from who knew which gal game.
The whole scene made it painfully clear exactly what kind of degenerate shut-in lifestyle Kaiba Chiha had been living lately.
Only the Kaiba family's own excellent genetics let her keep the "beautiful girl" prefix tacked onto her otherwise well-earned title of full-blown shut-in.
"Chiha, what happened to you? Back in the lower districts, you seemed like you were doing fine."
"None of your business!"
"Honestly, I don't want to deal with you either. Your sister was the one who insisted I come."
"Big sister, is that why you told him to come?" Talking to Yui, Kaiba Chiha's whole tone shifted, softer and gentler, even carrying a faint hint of flattery.
"Nope." Having finished tidying up the delivery boxes off the floor, Yui, now seated on Kaiba Chiha's bed, shook her head.
"Liar." Chiha shot a glare at Amano Rei standing outside her door.
"Hey now, did you forget you actually have two sisters?"
"Two sisters? Wait, are you saying, big sister sent you?"
From the little brat's own way of talking, Amano Rei understood that "big sister" currently referred to Yui, while plain "sister" meant Kaiba Chiaki.
"Liar!" Kaiba Chiha shot Amano Rei another sharp glare. "My sister would never come looking for me. Especially not by sending you of all people!"
Leaning sideways against the doorframe outside Chiha's room, arms crossed, Amano Rei raised two fingers.
"Chiha, you're wrong on two counts."
"First, your sister actually cares about you quite a bit. It's just that her personality is a little too rigid and forceful, so when she tries to show she cares, it comes out kind of awkward."
"My sister, she..."
"And second, honestly, your sister and I have been getting along pretty well lately. Our relationship's not bad at all, so it makes perfect sense she'd ask me to come find you."
[Kaiba Chiaki] [Affection: 88]
An affection score of 88. If that still didn't count as "getting along pretty well," then the numbers the system had assigned really weren't doing their job.
Hearing that Amano Rei and Chiaki were on good terms, Kaiba Chiha's expression twisted into something genuinely spectacular, visible to the naked eye.
"I, I don't believe you. There's no way my sister would ever get along with someone like you..."
Amano Rei closed his eyes, recalling. "If I remember right, it was the night of the 8th, the day the academy challenge tournament wrapped up. I stayed in your sister's office until well past midnight before I finally left. If you don't believe me, feel free to go check the hallway security footage at Kaiba Corp."
"Now that is some explosive gossip." Yui clapped a hand over her mouth in shock, savoring the thrill of a juicy scandal.
"You, you..." Kaiba Chiha spun straight around to her computer. Even though she wasn't physically at the company, with her own high-level access as the Kaiba family's second daughter, pulling up a stretch of hallway security footage was well within her reach.
And then Kaiba Chiha personally confirmed, with her own eyes, exactly what Amano Rei had described.
Amano Rei entering the president's office alongside Kaiba Chiaki at noon, and not stepping back out again until one in the morning.
Whatever had actually happened in the meantime remained a total mystery, since only Kaiba Chiaki herself held the access rights to pull footage from inside the president's office itself.
"You, you jerk! You absolute jerk!"
Tears nearly welling up at the corners of her eyes, Kaiba Chiha charged straight at Amano Rei in a blind rage.
She'd meant to grab him by the collar, but with the little brat being so much shorter than him, all she could manage was clawing at the chest of his shirt with everything she had.
"You jerk, what exactly did you do to big sister!"
"So now you're calling her 'big sister' too, huh?"
What had he done, exactly?
He could hardly admit the truth: that he and Kaiba Chiaki had spent the whole day dueling in the president's office, then gotten thoroughly beaten down together by the Atem AI.
Setting aside whether anyone would even believe that if he said it, it wouldn't have done anything to achieve what Amano Rei was actually trying to provoke in Kaiba Chiha anyway.
"You pervert! You bastard! You stinking piece of trash!"
Chiha's small fists rained down against Amano Rei's chest like a hailstorm, and rather than actually hurting, it left him with a strange sense of satisfaction, the kind you'd get from teasing a little kid.
Sobbing and pummeling him at the same time, Chiha's mind kept circling back to the image of her own once noble, coolly elegant, beautiful and dignified big sister, the one who'd been by her side since childhood, pinned down beneath this man right there in his office, and then...
The moment the image of her own sister lying bare in front of Amano Rei flashed through her mind, Chiha suddenly felt a violent cramp seize her stomach.
And then, riding a wave of stomach-churning vertigo, Chiha dropped straight to her knees and threw up right on Amano Rei's feet.
Why did people keep throwing up in front of him lately?
The unidentified liquid now coating his feet made the corner of Amano Rei's mouth twitch violently. Okay, this was way more devastating than the flurry of small fists had been.
Watching Kaiba Chiha in such a miserable state, Amano Rei actually felt a little guilty. Had he taken teasing the kid a little too far?
"Amano, was that really necessary? Poor little Chiha." Yui crouched down, rubbing Chiha's back soothingly.
Even his own childhood friend couldn't help but call him out. Yeah, he'd definitely overdone it.
Amano Rei had actually clocked it a while ago: the Kaiba sisters really were a purely, thoroughly twisted pair.
Deep down, they genuinely cared about each other. Chiha's earlier over-the-top declaration of affection, and her current protective, avoidant shutting herself away to keep from getting hurt, were both, in their own way, expressions of how much she cared about her own sister.
The proof was right there: Amano Rei had heard from Yui that Kaiba Chiha's whole shut-in phase had started right around the time she'd lost to Kaiba Chiaki in the academy challenge tournament.
Which led Amano Rei to guess that Chiha's slide into reclusive self-destruction was very likely tied to her own inability to accept her sister's defeat.
And if it came down to something related to dueling, then this was actually a solvable problem.
Time to fully exploit the fundamental laws underpinning the entire Yu-Gi-Oh universe.
In the Yu-Gi-Oh anime, whatever the issue, a strained father-son relationship, a broken grandfather-grandson bond, one duel with the protagonist's crew always seemed to fix it right up.
So Amano Rei had gone out of his way to engineer exactly this kind of opening.
"Kaiba Chiha, I'm giving you a chance!"
Even with his feet still covered in the mysterious green liquid Kaiba Chiha had just thrown up, Amano Rei forced himself to stay cold and composed, doing his best to play the villain the moment called for.
Sorry, President Kaiba. I really am sacrificing a lot for you here.
"Chiha, if you can beat me in a duel, I'll never go near your sister again. But if you lose, I'll let you stand outside the door and listen next time."
"Are you some kind of devil, Amano?" The brutal terms Amano Rei had just laid out startled even Yui.
What did "stand outside the door and listen" even mean?
Was he implying what she thought he was implying?
"Fine. You said it yourself, Amano Rei!" Even with unidentified liquid still clinging to the corner of her mouth, Kaiba Chiha ground her teeth and glared at Amano Rei, eyes burning with fury.
"I'm formally requesting an inter-academy platform duel! I'm going to beat you in front of everyone, and get revenge for big sister!"
An inter-academy platform duel wasn't the kind of match just any student could request.
Both applicants had to either currently rank in the top ten of their respective academies, or have held a top-ten ranking at some point before.
As it happened, Kaiba Chiha had been ranked tenth in her academy right up until she lost to Amano Rei.
And Amano Rei himself, having just beaten Kaiba Chiaki, currently sat exactly at tenth place in his own academy's standings.
The academy's former tenth place, against its current tenth place.
One from Synchro Academy, one from Xyz Academy.
Two people who'd already forged a fateful rivalry all the way back at the entrance exam duel.
News of this rematch, born of fate, took barely a single night to become the hottest topic of discussion across all three academies.
The next day, the dueling platform at Academy City's central plaza was already packed with students, drawing a crowd almost as intense as the campus queen duel just days before.
The moment Amano Rei and Kaiba Chiha both stepped onto the platform, Eva's synthesized announcement chime rang out in perfect unison with the crowd's own eager, drama-hungry cheers.
[Eva: Both duelists, please set your point multiplier.]
Under the special rules of an inter-academy platform duel, both sides could set a multiplier on the points at stake. Set it to double, for example, and losing 100 points would cost you 200 once the duel ended, with the winner gaining 200 in turn.
Under normal circumstances, unless it was a genuine blood feud, most duelists set the multiplier somewhere between two and three times.
Kaiba Chiha ground her pearly white teeth and forced the words out, one by one. "One hundred times!"
"Kaiba Chiha, are you in your right mind?" Amano Rei warned.
At a hundred times multiplier, whoever lost would be wiped out completely, their points reduced to zero, forced to start entirely from scratch. And any newly earned points couldn't even be spent again until they climbed back up past their previous peak.
Amano Rei genuinely didn't mind either way. He'd already climbed into the top ten within two months as it was; starting over would just mean repeating the same climb.
But it was different for Kaiba Chiha. The little brat's actual dueling skill was fairly average, honestly. Otherwise there was no way she'd have needed a deck stuffed full of expensive, rare cards just to barely claw her way to tenth place by her third year.
"One hundred times!" Kaiba Chiha repeated, louder, emphatic.
"Fine. I'm in! One hundred times!" Amano Rei delivered a classic line straight out of those old Hong Kong gambling movies.
[Eva: Multiplier set successfully. 100x.]
A duel that already had plenty of buzz behind it, once that hundred-times multiplier got announced, sent the surrounding crowd into an even louder, more enthusiastic round of applause.
This was a fight to the death, clearly. It looked like whatever grudge lay between these two had reached a point beyond reconciliation.
What the onlookers didn't know was that Amano Rei and Kaiba Chiha hadn't actually had any real bad blood between them for a while now. Ever since the little brat had helped protect District 32, Amano Rei hadn't thought badly of her at all.
But there wasn't much choice in the matter, since he was the one currently playing the role of "the blond punk who stole big sister away."
All to patch things up between the Kaiba sisters. Well, and also to make sure Kaiba Corp could actually go retrieve his own former fiancee, Celestia, from outside the Tower.
"Duel!" Times two.
At Eva's official declaration, both duelists called out the traditional opening cry at exactly the same time.
Kaiba Chiha swept her eyes across the watching crowd and, sure enough, spotted Kaiba Chiaki's own figure right up in the front row.
Of course Chiaki couldn't have stayed away, not after Amano Rei had personally told her about this whole thing.
"Sister!" Kaiba Chiha looked down at her deck, silently steeling her resolve, and pointed straight at Amano Rei.
"Amano Rei, with this duel, I'm taking back everything I lost. My ranking points, and big sister, I'm taking all of it back!"
"Oh? You really think you can still pull that off?"
The duel began, with Amano Rei taking the first move and drawing his card to open the turn.
If this had happened back at the start of the semester, maybe Kaiba Chiha could have posed some kind of threat to Amano Rei. But by now, his own strength had grown far beyond anything a little brat like her could hope to touch.
"Save your breath, Amano!" Kaiba Chiha shouted defiantly. "I won't let you take one more thing from me!"
Bold words, real conviction. Impressive stuff.
Beginning his turn, Amano Rei flung a Spell Card onto his Duel Disk.
"Alright, I activate the Spell Card Celestial Submission!"
[Celestial Submission] [Spell Card: Pay 1000 Life Points, then declare the name of 1 Level 8 or higher monster card to activate. Your opponent reveals their Deck; if the declared monster is among it, add the revealed card to the hand of the player who activated this card.]
Amano Rei LP: 4000 to 3000
"I declare Galaxy-Eyes Photon Dragon!"
The confident, determined look on Kaiba Chiha's face just a moment ago instantly curdled into something bitterly green around the edges.
("I won't let you take one more thing from me!")
And then, obediently, the little brat handed Galaxy-Eyes Photon Dragon straight over into Amano Rei's own hand.
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